Another startup, Modern Meadow, is using tissue-engineering technique to produce in-vitro leather and meat without requiring the raising, slaughtering, and transporting animals.

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On the other hand, since the mid-1990s private-equity firms have taken every opportunity to stress that they do not depend on financial engineering a technique that they say is now widely imitated by public companies and thus no longer a source of advantage.

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The camp's re-engineering awards went to a group that developed a technique to alter the ID numbers on Global System for Mobile Communications cell phones and to another team that found a way to defeat a biometric fingerprint scanning system.

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The genetic changes that result from any conventional technique are far less precise, predictable, and controllable than those associated with modern genetic engineering.

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The technique used by Green and Hollister is part of a burgeoning field called regenerative medicine, which involves engineering therapies -- using things like stem cells, or "body parts" constructed out of biological material -- to harness the body's ability to heal itself.

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